


ANTHROPOCENE

by eternitas



Series: MANEATER [1]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Incubus England, Other, Succubi & Incubi, francis/arthur friendship, goth raves, jarring tonal shifts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:54:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28970178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternitas/pseuds/eternitas
Summary: There are no doctors in hell. There are no philosophers in hell, either.Or: Arthur may be brain-damaged and depressed and directionless and a little bit horny, but…?
Series: MANEATER [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2125020
Comments: 6
Kudos: 1





	ANTHROPOCENE

This unbreathable night air, the humming of hell-pylons, Eden’s mutilated serpent around his waist and wrists and ribs, some kind of residue between his thighs, red lipstick smeared across his mouth,

Arthur is waking up.

* * *

He’s waking up next to Francis or Feliks or whoever the fuck (the sweat-damp hair, a sliver of shoulder white as numbness). They’re still as a corpse, and by the claw marks climbing the length of their back Arthur knows precisely what he’d done to them, how hard he’d fucked them, the shade of metal he’d tasted in his mouth when they’d bitten at one another and writhed and writhed. He prefers, in general, not to think about matters like this: sexually he’s not so very careful, but sex nevertheless is an act which is greater than a necessity to him. There’s sentiment, too, and it’s pleasant, all the love in his heart tied up so intimately with the threads of orgasm that he doesn’t know one from the other. It makes him a failure, he’s been told. How strange, to fail at existing.

The uncorpse turns. It’s not Francis.

It glares. It’s not Feliks.

Arthur stares back. His face must look like shit.

“Er, good morning?”

For a moment their gaze remains fixed. Then:

“It’s afternoon,” they say, hissing the fricative.

“Oh.” Arthur moves to stretch and stand and they do not stop him.

What might be considered a sky is clouded over this afternoon. Red dust clinging to his skin. Ostensibly they’d fucked in a meadow, crushing the weeds, the tallgrasses. Arthur wonders if his partner is the type to consider hell all exterior or all interior, because there certainly isn’t both here: it’s an endless system of rooms and tunnels, some decorated with plants and animals; else it’s habitable field and forest, an evening he can slip into and occupy.

His partner yawns and stands. They brush some dandelion fluff from Arthur’s hair.

“Thanks,” he says. Silence answers.

They shrug, lazy thing, and dress, and leave, their form receding into the greyness of distance. Arthur watches them for a while, then sits back down. A snail crawls up his thigh.

Still naked, still trembling. 

The air here is obscenely cold.

* * *

“Your face,” Francis says, “looks like, ah, shit.”

He says this while they’re eating lunch together, the basket hidden by reeds, the wine glasses. Crystallized black sludge glistens on Francis’s antlers. The deliverer of lost souls rows across the river’s length, carrying fish-eyed passengers.

“Took you long enough to say so, fucker,” Arthur replies.

Francis presses his lips together, frozen half-pity.

“Have you been feeding recently?” Leaning subtly closer.

“No, I— _yes_ I have been feeding recently, why wouldn’t I be?”

“Oh, you… oh, oh…” Francis lies back on the gravel, throwing one leg over the other. “How I wish I could say the same! My doctor, he tells me I should refrain from overindulging, so this is what I have been doing—but, oh! Did you know there is a real chance of death from internal bleeding if one feeds too excessively, or abstains? I’ve lost my _joie de vivre._ No, I’ve lost more than merely that. Arthur—I think I’m _dying_.”

“There are no doctors down here. Also, sorry about your erectile dysfunction.”

“Oh, you fiend!” He directs a kick to Arthur’s shin but it just arcs the air pathetically.

“Yeah, yeah.” Arthur exposes his throat, tilting his wine glass as far back as he can. One drop pours out, rich, dark. He swirls his tongue around his mouth. A cry like a jackdaw’s rings across the landscape: for now, they can pretend they’re both living.

“When does the new semester start, again?” Francis asks. “Next week, I know, but was it Monday? Or Wednesday?”

Gentle sound of swallowing. “Monday.”

“Ah. Thank you. I cannot say I am very enthusiastic. At least you get to—you are going to spend a portion of the semester on Earth, aren’t you?”

“I applied for it, yes.”

If he stays on Earth long enough, maybe everyone will forget about him. Stupid sentimental Arthur with piss in his heart. Something to be said about a system which looks to teach processes without fulfillment and still expects him not to want anything else.

But “How nice,” Francis says, heedless of anyone’s thoughts. “But I wish that I could…” 

His eyes become vacant.

Arthur prods him lightly, asking _What?_ , but then he hears it, too:

“Shit.”

(Who’s speaking?)

They run, Arthur bruises himself somehow, Francis pulls him forward by the arm and his cry of Arthur’s name is swallowed by the primordial silence, it doesn’t matter, run, run, run. Storms of dust shiver to life behind them, rolling, rolling, water deep as ink thick as ink rises, drowning land, drowning sky, drowning life, drowning God.

Run, run, run, the blindness is creeping already into Arthur’s vision and they run, they run, they reach the fence and claw their way to the other side, crusted earth underneath their nails, death on their flesh, it doesn’t matter, choking, heaving, inhaling and exhaling are the same.

The implosion comes far behind them, but never far enough.

Those lands are dead now. They’re worse than dead. The space left behind is living poison.

Arthur wants to say something like, _We survived again_ , but more than that he just wants to vomit.

“Shit,” Francis says again, like they’re both alive. Like they didn’t give themselves to this a long time ago: a rising and a falling like the beating of a cigarette heart, an anhedonia like eternal burning.

* * *

The most dismal thing: his thoughts operate independent of his conscience, and so Arthur is now dry heaving into the pit in Francis’s garden, wishing he were strong enough to cry. To really cry, so many tears that his eyes grow red and swollen and horrible.

He willfully ignores Francis’s repeated whisper of _Are you okay?_ but accepts the hand at his back.

Arthur groans. The dead tree (its branches identical to the veins at his eyelids) appears to duplicate, then multiply before him.

“My dear, we really should not go out as often if you don’t want to risk…”

“‘m _fine._ ”

However reassurance looks, Francis does not look like that.

“I will bring you some painkillers.”

He leaves. Arthur’s conscience knows he’ll return but his thoughts believe he won’t.

And his thoughts sound like this: Does it always end like this? Does it always end this exact way, with someone leaving, the fading of a voice, the slamming of a door?

* * *

Happily sedated. There is only one tree again.

“I presume you are better now,” a disembodied voice to his left is saying.

“Mmm.”

“And I presume you still want to go out tonight.”

“Mmm.”

“You are perfectly horrendous.”

* * *

It will be okay. The world can be a good place. The past doesn’t have to exist if you don’t want it to.

* * *

Arthur and Francis go to a goth rave in someone else’s basement. For his part, Arthur forgets what he’d put on earlier that evening: staring at his boots, he catches a glimpse of fishnet stockings. Black clothes stained with blacker sludge. He nurses his drink in the corner, wondering to himself just how vast this basement is. This fragment of the world is obscured by colored mist. Impossible to determine where the room ends, or begins.

“Francis,” he says, and motions to hook his arm around his friend’s. No one’s there.

He turns his head to see Francis making out with a cybergoth across the room. Ordinarily he would let himself be angered by this kind of betrayal, however minimal it is, but by now the effects of the drink have begun to settle and he feels in its place a beautiful humming sounding like violin strings.

Ah! Surreal world! Wondrous world!

* * *

In a bathroom stall, reverb through the walls. Arthur is riding a stranger’s cock, pupils rolling up, up, up.

“Fucking slut,” the stranger’s telling him, voice a growl. “Taking my cock like it’s all you’re made for.”

Maybe it’s the ecstasy or the brain damage-induced hypersensitivity, but this offends Arthur. Greatly.

He detaches himself from the stranger’s body and glares.

“What the fuck, I’m literally going to fucking kill you,” he spits. When they only gape back he huffs and leaves the bathroom and the slamming of the door echoes in his head for what feels like years afterward.

He’d seen himself briefly in the mirror before leaving. He’d rather not talk about it.

* * *

Forget everything. The past won’t ever stop existing.

* * *

They speculate on their human lives sometimes, not that it is a subject which exploration would do much good. There are no philosophers down here, either.

Arthur’s nightmares do not concern much from the outside: they comprise of sound and fury and sound. If he’d had a real life, it was a sinner’s life, swollen with wounds and unclean work. Midnight, languishing on a pasture. A sick idyll. Even the flies don’t want you.

He thinks about this sometimes, and then keeps thinking about it as though an answer will emerge from the void…

But they kill you for knowing too much. Arthur has seen it.

* * *

“It’s okay. It’s okay. Tolys, Tolys…”

His fingers stutter as they stroke the hair of the demon in his arms. Tolys sobs so hard his shoulders quiver.

“Maybe they didn’t really hear you. Maybe they heard someone else.”

Even to himself this sounds like a lie. No hypothetical authority here: authority is an absolute, a despot, a cruelty. It is faceless: no single person to uphold the will of a king that doesn’t exist. Every execution is a social failure. The incubi, the succubi impossibly small: only one means of making their lives meaningful, even if it turns them into the next sacrificial lamb, turns them into the blade on which the lamb is skewered.

“Arthur…” Tolys’s voice is so weak Arthur thinks it’s his own.

“You don’t have to try to make this better. I know what they heard.”

This is somehow even worse than denial. Arthur regrets so much all of a sudden, the obedience, the mob mentality, standing with his fingers digging into his eyes until they bleed black sludge as strangers are beaten in front of him. He knows Tolys hates him. He’s so impossibly tired of being here.

“I can… I can try to talk to Braginsky, the professor I mean, we’re good friends, he could probably send you to Earth in time—”

“No, no, Arthur, please, I can’t, I have—I have people I love here…”

(People to love?)

“They’ll come for me. It’s okay. Just go before they do.”

(A mob will come running, howling as it runs…)

Arthur knows Tolys will untangle himself from his own body—in hours, in minutes. It is not the knowledge that they won’t ever meet again but the sight, the real sight, of his departure that feels to him like impalement. If he cycled through all his memories of Tolys, from meeting to what they both know will come, it feels so superficial: only so many moments, neat and separate, they can be counted without even thinking. So why is he crying for this person, this vessel?

The crime isn’t the point. The punishment is never the effect.

He doesn’t read the papers the next morning.

* * *

Arthur catches a friend stooped over, burying something large. He opens his mouth and draws closer, then halts.

They turn around.

“Feliks,” Arthur begins, but can’t continue. “I’m…”

They don’t answer. They turn back away and crawl into the grave, and shut their eyes forever.

* * *

This was before everything. Inhaling and exhaling are the same, the air cold and stale. The beginning and the present are the same. He can’t understand either. Are the space before a beginning and the space after an ending the same space?

Arthur is seated in the university director’s office. The director is studying something on the other side of the horizon-line, has been doing so since Arthur entered and sat down.

Plenty these days he doesn’t question. Ever more these days he physically can’t. Is he ever going to get better? Doubtful. We don’t know the answer, so better not to try.

But what if he did? Thought is a beginning. Terminate the loop, break it. He doesn’t have a personality beyond what’s happened to him, which is simultaneously so much and so little, infinismal, so small he could crush it in a fist, turn it to pollen. And the love in his heart—the love—the love—from which crack had it slithered, why does it exist in him so potently and so painfully? He resolves to never call something love again, not having, not holding, not tenderness, not—

“Arthur,” the director says.

“We have a mission for you.”

**Author's Note:**

> paintings by Zdzisław Beksiński


End file.
